A Kearney
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 39462 |
|---|---|
| NOME | A Kearney |
| PRENOMES | A |
| SOBRENOME | Kearney |
| ASSINATURA | KEARNEY A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Flinders University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4559-0660 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 187 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 41 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2009 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Post-Conventional Anthropology
This special issue on ‘Post-conventional Anthropology’ celebrates and challenges anthropology as a discipline and praxis under contemporary conditions. The contributors are anthropologists at diverse career stages who have accepted the prompt to consider anthropological convention and the future of the discipline. Their contributions refuse a story of disciplinary decline and instead encourage us to ask more of anthropology. They are galvanised b…
Rethinking boundaries
Drawing inspiration from the work of Tim Maloney and India Ella Dilkes-Hall, whose 2020 critical reassessment of tula diffusion in the southern Kimberley (Western Australia) revealed a more gradual, regionally mediated uptake than previously proposed, we report on a number of new tula occurrences in Marra Country, Limmen National Park (Northern Territory) and examine the associated technological and cultural implications. While archaeologists hav…
Post-Conventional Anthropology, Praxis, and Value
Beginning as a comparative science, interested in myriad aspects of human experience, anthropology has in recent decades become the subject of intense political praxis, examined for its complicity in projects of power. These and other such provocations have cluttered my own relationship with the discipline for several years. So too has a fatigue traced to the evidenced dismissal of anthropology’s legitimacy in academic spaces; specifically, insti…
Sweeping Stone, Cleaning Country
In this paper we demonstrate how a concentrated mound of 8622 stone artefacts excavated at Walanjiwurru 1 rockshelter in Marra Country, northern Australia, reflects the emotional and spiritual dimensions of sweeping, and moral obligations to maintain Country. While archaeological studies have previously documented sweeping as part of site formation, and the social significance of stone in Australia is well established, few studies have examined h…
Medical pluralism and kincentric care in Indigenous Australia
For over four decades we have collaborated as a team of anthropologists and Indigenous Elders of the Yanyuwa language group. The Yanyuwa are the Indigenous owners of lands and waters in Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria. While medicalized healthcare has not been our specific research focus, wellness and ill health have been recurring themes. Death has been tragically prevalent. So too has been a sense of liveliness among households in the remote to…
Joint managed national parks as a refraction of unsettled settler Australia
Paying attention to Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in the unsettled settler space that is constituted by Australia's National Park network, we explore the faultlines which threaten to undermine the success of joint management approaches. Central to our discussion is the matter of 'trust - or lack thereof', as it shapes and influences investment in Indigenous Law and culture as a central pillar for management. We argue that it is a lack o…
The seascape in stone
Relationships between landscape and motifs have featured in 'rock art' research worldwide. Yet there has been comparatively little exploration of rock art's significance in constructing maritime lifeways. This paper uses a dataset of 3183 images from 65 island and coastal rock art sites in Yanyuwa Sea Country in northern Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria to investigate how marine-centric concepts linked to rock art are applied to inscribe a seascap…
Post-conventional anthropology
This article details an encounter of anthropological instruction on cross-cultural perceptions of the environment and cultural heritage which was provided to lawyers, environmental scientists, and environmental engineers regulating offshore oil and gas ventures. Shaped as a rapid organizational ethnography, my task was to inspire unknowing and release the grip on epistemic certainty. Operating within a contentious space, regulatory decision-makin…
Keeping Inside the Law
Always a Trace
In this paper, we explore how we might “see” and interrogate absence and presence in the archaeological record. Our aim is to bring into question the epistemic lens (archaeological), through which absence is made visible, and the epistemic lens (Indigenous knowledge), through which absence is made impossible. To do this, we turn to the contact rock art record from Yanyuwa Country in northern Australia, where, despite four centuries of contact wit…
Sea Country
There are distinct bodies of cultural knowledge attached to the sea. In this paper we orient the focus towards the nature and extent of cultural framings of sea territories, as inclusive of submerged landscapes, for Indigenous maritime peoples in northern Australia. This approach is distinguished by a pluralist methodology and reorients the primal focus of a human geography and broader geographical scholarship concerning submerged landscapes to b…
Communicative Pathways
Testimony and witnessing require sentiency, not humanity. Sentiency is distinguished here as the capacity to experience energetic coalescing between elements/entities/presences and to derive a response from such encounters. Taking as its focal point the kincentric ecology and lifeworld of Yanyuwa Country in the south-west Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia, this paper strives to expand the conceptual roots for a discussion of testimony and w…
Keeping Company
This chapter considers the principle of “keeping company” as a praxis of companionship, rights and responsibility that defines many Indigenous people’s relationships to their Country, language, Law and other cultural expressions. Keeping company involves a relational complementarity, and invokes principles of the communal and interconnected, over the individual or atomized visions of social and cultural life. This discussion is directly inspired …
Contact’ Rock Art and the Hybrid Economy Model
Studies of introduced subject matter in rock-art assemblages typically focus on themes of cross-cultural interaction, change and continuity, power and resistance. However, the economic frameworks guiding or shaping the production of an assemblage have often been overlooked. In this paper we use a case study involving a recently recorded assemblage of introduced subject matter from Marra Country in northern Australia's southwest Gulf of Carpentari…
Keeping Company
This book offers up a study of relational modalities in a moment of increasingly vexed identity politics. It takes inspiration from the art of keeping company, a relational habit derived on a kincentric ontology and praxis of interconnected life among the Yanyuwa, Indigenous owners of lands and waters in northern Australia. Diving deep into this multidimensional art of relating, the book critically engages with the counter habit of reductive iden…
An anthropology of being-in-relation
From Sorcery to Laboratory
The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted renewed attention among health professionals, Aboriginal community leaders, and social scientists to the need for culturally responsive preventative health measures and strategies. This article, a collaborative effort, involving Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola and two anthropologists with whom Yanyuwa have long associations, tracks the story of pandemics from the perspective of Aborigina…
To Cut Down the Dreaming
The main argument presented here is that in cultural contact zones, such as the Australian settler state, there can emerge violent tendencies in dominant patterns of thought, as both epistemic habits and systems of value. The logic of coloniality is one of war, destruction and inequality, and this is expressed through attempted erasure and actual ambivalence towards Indigenous peoples, their lands, waters, Laws and cultures. This is supported by …
Mobility of Mind
This is Our Story
This article presents a dialogue about the COVID-19 pandemic with Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola, southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia.1 As we examine in a longer work, the coronavirus pandemic is one chapter in the history of pandemics in the region, from which Yanyuwa have born social and cultural consciousness around the threat and actuality of incoming sickness and loss of life, translating meaning and l…
Nalangkulurru, the Spirit Beings, and the Black‐Nosed Python
We write from an ontological premise that there are other ways to know and understand the “archaeological record” and “rock art” that are devoid of Western ontology, and there have been for many millennia. In this article, we consider one specific Indigenous place and its associated visual elements, what might be commonly referred to as “rock art.” This place, Nalangkalurru, is replete with meaning, grounded in a well‐founded and understood logic…
A rare miniature and small-scale stencil assemblage from the Gulf of Carpentaria
Recent survey in the Gulf of Carpentaria region of northern Australia has identified a unique assemblage of miniature and small-scale stencilled motifs depicting anthropomorphs, material culture, macropod tracks and linear designs. The unusual sizes and shapes of these motifs raise questions about the types of material used for the stencil templates. Drawing on ethnographic data and experimental archaeology, the authors argue that the motifs were…
Kincentric Ecology, Species Maintenance and the Relational Power of Place in Northern Australia
This paper considers themes of species maintenance and place engagement in Yanyuwa country, northern Australia. It traces the complexity of interpretations and relational contexts involved in places that are commonly – and we argue – misleadingly, referred to as increase and magic sites. Examining one specific place, at which people carry out maintenance rituals, we explore the complex bonds that unite Yanyuwa with the geography that is the Ances…
Interculturalism and Responsive Reflexivity in a Settler Colonial Context
This article explores interculturalism in Australia, a nation marked by the impact of coloniality and deep colonising. Fostering interculturalism-as a form of empathic understanding and being in good relations with difference-across Indigenous and non-Indigenous lived experiences has proven difficult in Australia. This paper offers a scoping of existing discourse on interculturalism, asking firstly, 'what is interculturalism', that is, what is be…
A Place of Substance
This article is dedicated to a close examination of how stories of Indigenous place meaning come to light, and the pathways by which they travel, both physically (as tangible expressions) and intellectually (as intangible expressions). It offers a reflection on the epistemic habits that render these stories audible, visual, and otherwise sensual in the context of one Indigenous Australian community. Appreciating the communicative pathways that ex…
Too strong to ever not be there
This paper reflects on the emotional geography of a place; one part of the Yanyuwa people's Indigenous homelands in northern Australia. It offers a biography of a Yanyuwa place that is deemed 'too strong to ever not be there'. There is no discreet past or present chapter in the story of this place, rather there is a continual narrative that exists right here and now, one that is embodied in emotional engagements drawn from people's connections to…
Negotiating Yanyuwa Rock Art
Archaeologists have routinely used insights derived from the study of rock art to learn more about the lifeways of humans from the deep and recent past. Yet questions concerning the contemporary significance, symbolism, and meaning of rock art to Indigenous communities have often been overlooked in pursuit of archaeological agendas. In this article, we examine contemporary engagement with rock art by the Yanyuwa Aboriginal community in northern A…
Sitting in the gap
For close to six decades, ethnoarchaeology has studied the present to better understand the past. However, if understanding the past is paramount, then what of the wishes and interests of those with whom we collaborate in the present? This situation raises questions such as who is ethnoarchaeology for, and how might its outcomes be valuable to both researchers and collaborators? We address these issues by focusing on the space in which researcher…
Homeland Emotion
Drawn into a discussion of emotional environs, this paper offers up an emotional geography of the social and sensory relations that define a group’s heritage and traditional homelands. It focuses on the homelands and heritage of the Yanyuwa, the Indigenous owners of land and waters throughout the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. This discussion provides an insight into homelands that are deemed ‘too strong to ever not be there’,…
Sea Country
There are distinct bodies of cultural knowledge attached to the sea. In this paper we orient the focus towards the nature and extent of cultural framings of sea territories, as inclusive of submerged landscapes, for Indigenous maritime peoples in northern Australia. This approach is distinguished by a pluralist methodology and reorients the primal focus of a human geography and broader geographical scholarship concerning submerged landscapes to b…
To Cut Down the Dreaming
The main argument presented here is that in cultural contact zones, such as the Australian settler state, there can emerge violent tendencies in dominant patterns of thought, as both epistemic habits and systems of value. The logic of coloniality is one of war, destruction and inequality, and this is expressed through attempted erasure and actual ambivalence towards Indigenous peoples, their lands, waters, Laws and cultures. This is supported by …
Intimacy and Distance
Among the strategies employed by colonial authorities to 'manage' Indigenous people, forced removal and centralisation to townships was a deliberate attempt to fragment relationships to home territories. For Yanyuwa, an Indigenous group in northern Australia, this meant being removed from their saltwater 'country' in the Gulf of Carpentaria and resettled 60 km inland. Despite this violent act Yanyuwa saltwater identity has remained strong. Whilst…
Post-conventional anthropology
This article details an encounter of anthropological instruction on cross-cultural perceptions of the environment and cultural heritage which was provided to lawyers, environmental scientists, and environmental engineers regulating offshore oil and gas ventures. Shaped as a rapid organizational ethnography, my task was to inspire unknowing and release the grip on epistemic certainty. Operating within a contentious space, regulatory decision-makin…
Returning to that which was never lost
In this paper I explore the kincentric ecologies that define sea country for Indigenous Australians, in particular the Yanyuwa of Northern Australia. Despite colonial alienation from their coastal territories, Yanyuwa have sustained a four-decade long legal fight for restitution. Using the framework of 'urgent patience' as resistance against 'social death', this paper tracks the historical legacy of legislative land rights for saltwater peoples
Contact’ Rock Art and the Hybrid Economy Model
Studies of introduced subject matter in rock-art assemblages typically focus on themes of cross-cultural interaction, change and continuity, power and resistance. However, the economic frameworks guiding or shaping the production of an assemblage have often been overlooked. In this paper we use a case study involving a recently recorded assemblage of introduced subject matter from Marra Country in northern Australia's southwest Gulf of Carpentari…
A rare miniature and small-scale stencil assemblage from the Gulf of Carpentaria
Recent survey in the Gulf of Carpentaria region of northern Australia has identified a unique assemblage of miniature and small-scale stencilled motifs depicting anthropomorphs, material culture, macropod tracks and linear designs. The unusual sizes and shapes of these motifs raise questions about the types of material used for the stencil templates. Drawing on ethnographic data and experimental archaeology, the authors argue that the motifs were…
A Place of Substance
This article is dedicated to a close examination of how stories of Indigenous place meaning come to light, and the pathways by which they travel, both physically (as tangible expressions) and intellectually (as intangible expressions). It offers a reflection on the epistemic habits that render these stories audible, visual, and otherwise sensual in the context of one Indigenous Australian community. Appreciating the communicative pathways that ex…
Nalangkulurru, the Spirit Beings, and the Black‐Nosed Python
We write from an ontological premise that there are other ways to know and understand the “archaeological record” and “rock art” that are devoid of Western ontology, and there have been for many millennia. In this article, we consider one specific Indigenous place and its associated visual elements, what might be commonly referred to as “rock art.” This place, Nalangkalurru, is replete with meaning, grounded in a well‐founded and understood logic…
Interculturalism and Responsive Reflexivity in a Settler Colonial Context
This article explores interculturalism in Australia, a nation marked by the impact of coloniality and deep colonising. Fostering interculturalism-as a form of empathic understanding and being in good relations with difference-across Indigenous and non-Indigenous lived experiences has proven difficult in Australia. This paper offers a scoping of existing discourse on interculturalism, asking firstly, 'what is interculturalism', that is, what is be…
Always a Trace
In this paper, we explore how we might “see” and interrogate absence and presence in the archaeological record. Our aim is to bring into question the epistemic lens (archaeological), through which absence is made visible, and the epistemic lens (Indigenous knowledge), through which absence is made impossible. To do this, we turn to the contact rock art record from Yanyuwa Country in northern Australia, where, despite four centuries of contact wit…
Ethnicity, cultural wounding and the ‘healing project
In this paper, I introduce the term ‘cultural wounding’ as central to an analysis of ethnicity and ethnic identities that have experienced trauma through inter-ethnic conflict. Cultural wounding speaks to rupture and assault in a physical, emotional, spiritual and ideological sense. By establishing the definitional character of cultural wounding, I present a discussion of the ‘wounds’ that result from the deliberate targeting of ethnic groups in …
He painted the law
Early colonial expeditions were responsible for the documentation of the Australian landscape, fauna, flora and the indigenous owners of the land. Today, these documentations remain: locked in archives and hanging on the walls of museums. Visual representations reflect artistic traditions of the time and the curiosities of colonial administrations. In this article, the authors discuss a painting by the artist William Westall, who accompanied Matt…
Communicative Pathways
Testimony and witnessing require sentiency, not humanity. Sentiency is distinguished here as the capacity to experience energetic coalescing between elements/entities/presences and to derive a response from such encounters. Taking as its focal point the kincentric ecology and lifeworld of Yanyuwa Country in the south-west Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia, this paper strives to expand the conceptual roots for a discussion of testimony and w…
Rock Art as Cultural Expressions of Social Relationships and Kinship
This chapter examines rock art as cultural expressions of social relationships and kinship. More specifically, it considers the type(s) of relationships that exist or emerge in Indigenous contexts and how appreciation of these relationships can elucidate the meaning, symbolism, and significance of rock art. It first explores the relational contexts of rock art by citing examples involving sorcery before discussing the social embeddedness of rock …
Manankurra
Homeland Emotion
Drawn into a discussion of emotional environs, this paper offers up an emotional geography of the social and sensory relations that define a group’s heritage and traditional homelands. It focuses on the homelands and heritage of the Yanyuwa, the Indigenous owners of land and waters throughout the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. This discussion provides an insight into homelands that are deemed ‘too strong to ever not be there’,…
Too strong to ever not be there
This paper reflects on the emotional geography of a place; one part of the Yanyuwa people's Indigenous homelands in northern Australia. It offers a biography of a Yanyuwa place that is deemed 'too strong to ever not be there'. There is no discreet past or present chapter in the story of this place, rather there is a continual narrative that exists right here and now, one that is embodied in emotional engagements drawn from people's connections to…
He painted the law
Early colonial expeditions were responsible for the documentation of the Australian landscape, fauna, flora and the indigenous owners of the land. Today, these documentations remain: locked in archives and hanging on the walls of museums. Visual representations reflect artistic traditions of the time and the curiosities of colonial administrations. In this article, the authors discuss a painting by the artist William Westall, who accompanied Matt…
Present Memories
In this chapter I explore time and temporality through the lens of present memories and memory projects. I build on the very premise of this volume; that time is not always rushing into the future and can involve new configurations of the relations between the tenses. Present memories and memory projects represent slippages in time and space, an alternative temporality in which all that exists is ‘present’ and ‘now’, and all that precedes and pro…
Performing Place, Practicing Memories
Present Memories
Life in the Affirmative—Cultural Wounding, Healing, and African Descent in Brazil
Much has been written on race and ethnicity in Brazil. Taken up as a point of reflection by social scientists, historians, poets, and novelists the world over, Brazil’s complicated history of Indigenous heritage, slavery, migration, and the resulting tapestry of diverse ethnic citizenries has been heavily documented. It has been told through narratives of celebrated racial plurality and proud nationalism yet also portrayed through accounts of eth…
Cultural Wounding, Healing, and Emerging Ethnicities
"Cultural Wounding, Healing, and Emerging Ethnicities presents an analysis of ethnic identities that have emerged from contexts of political conflict and social suffering. Today, there is new appeal in the analysis of ethnicity, not merely as innate and fixed identities or fragmented and lost identities, but rather as wounded and then creatively reclaimed. If ethnic identity is more than a primordial sense of self, then what does it mean for ethn…
Ethnicity, cultural wounding and the ‘healing project
In this paper, I introduce the term ‘cultural wounding’ as central to an analysis of ethnicity and ethnic identities that have experienced trauma through inter-ethnic conflict. Cultural wounding speaks to rupture and assault in a physical, emotional, spiritual and ideological sense. By establishing the definitional character of cultural wounding, I present a discussion of the ‘wounds’ that result from the deliberate targeting of ethnic groups in …
When a long way in a bark canoe becomes a quick trip in a boat’ relationships to sea country & changes to Yanyuwa watercraft
Sitting in the gap
For close to six decades, ethnoarchaeology has studied the present to better understand the past. However, if understanding the past is paramount, then what of the wishes and interests of those with whom we collaborate in the present? This situation raises questions such as who is ethnoarchaeology for, and how might its outcomes be valuable to both researchers and collaborators? We address these issues by focusing on the space in which researcher…
Negotiating Yanyuwa Rock Art
Archaeologists have routinely used insights derived from the study of rock art to learn more about the lifeways of humans from the deep and recent past. Yet questions concerning the contemporary significance, symbolism, and meaning of rock art to Indigenous communities have often been overlooked in pursuit of archaeological agendas. In this article, we examine contemporary engagement with rock art by the Yanyuwa Aboriginal community in northern A…
Rock Art as Cultural Expressions of Social Relationships and Kinship
This chapter examines rock art as cultural expressions of social relationships and kinship. More specifically, it considers the type(s) of relationships that exist or emerge in Indigenous contexts and how appreciation of these relationships can elucidate the meaning, symbolism, and significance of rock art. It first explores the relational contexts of rock art by citing examples involving sorcery before discussing the social embeddedness of rock …
A Place of Substance
This article is dedicated to a close examination of how stories of Indigenous place meaning come to light, and the pathways by which they travel, both physically (as tangible expressions) and intellectually (as intangible expressions). It offers a reflection on the epistemic habits that render these stories audible, visual, and otherwise sensual in the context of one Indigenous Australian community. Appreciating the communicative pathways that ex…
Returning to that which was never lost
In this paper I explore the kincentric ecologies that define sea country for Indigenous Australians, in particular the Yanyuwa of Northern Australia. Despite colonial alienation from their coastal territories, Yanyuwa have sustained a four-decade long legal fight for restitution. Using the framework of 'urgent patience' as resistance against 'social death', this paper tracks the historical legacy of legislative land rights for saltwater peoples
Intimacy and Distance
Among the strategies employed by colonial authorities to 'manage' Indigenous people, forced removal and centralisation to townships was a deliberate attempt to fragment relationships to home territories. For Yanyuwa, an Indigenous group in northern Australia, this meant being removed from their saltwater 'country' in the Gulf of Carpentaria and resettled 60 km inland. Despite this violent act Yanyuwa saltwater identity has remained strong. Whilst…
Kincentric Ecology, Species Maintenance and the Relational Power of Place in Northern Australia
This paper considers themes of species maintenance and place engagement in Yanyuwa country, northern Australia. It traces the complexity of interpretations and relational contexts involved in places that are commonly – and we argue – misleadingly, referred to as increase and magic sites. Examining one specific place, at which people carry out maintenance rituals, we explore the complex bonds that unite Yanyuwa with the geography that is the Ances…
Interculturalism and Responsive Reflexivity in a Settler Colonial Context
This article explores interculturalism in Australia, a nation marked by the impact of coloniality and deep colonising. Fostering interculturalism-as a form of empathic understanding and being in good relations with difference-across Indigenous and non-Indigenous lived experiences has proven difficult in Australia. This paper offers a scoping of existing discourse on interculturalism, asking firstly, 'what is interculturalism', that is, what is be…
Mobility of Mind
This is Our Story
This article presents a dialogue about the COVID-19 pandemic with Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola, southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia.1 As we examine in a longer work, the coronavirus pandemic is one chapter in the history of pandemics in the region, from which Yanyuwa have born social and cultural consciousness around the threat and actuality of incoming sickness and loss of life, translating meaning and l…
Nalangkulurru, the Spirit Beings, and the Black‐Nosed Python
We write from an ontological premise that there are other ways to know and understand the “archaeological record” and “rock art” that are devoid of Western ontology, and there have been for many millennia. In this article, we consider one specific Indigenous place and its associated visual elements, what might be commonly referred to as “rock art.” This place, Nalangkalurru, is replete with meaning, grounded in a well‐founded and understood logic…
A rare miniature and small-scale stencil assemblage from the Gulf of Carpentaria
Recent survey in the Gulf of Carpentaria region of northern Australia has identified a unique assemblage of miniature and small-scale stencilled motifs depicting anthropomorphs, material culture, macropod tracks and linear designs. The unusual sizes and shapes of these motifs raise questions about the types of material used for the stencil templates. Drawing on ethnographic data and experimental archaeology, the authors argue that the motifs were…
Keeping Company
This book offers up a study of relational modalities in a moment of increasingly vexed identity politics. It takes inspiration from the art of keeping company, a relational habit derived on a kincentric ontology and praxis of interconnected life among the Yanyuwa, Indigenous owners of lands and waters in northern Australia. Diving deep into this multidimensional art of relating, the book critically engages with the counter habit of reductive iden…
An anthropology of being-in-relation
Sociology (27 obras) · Indigenous (24 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (18 obras) · Geography (18 obras) · History (18 obras) · Ecology (17 obras) · Political science (15 obras) · Anthropology (14 obras) · Archaeology (14 obras) · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights (14 obras)